Sarris: The game that nearly broke the space-time continuum (and your favorite data website)
From SABR member Eno Sarris at The Athletic on September 10, 2019, with mention of SABR member Sean Forman:
After an announced delay of 110 days and three hours, the Tigers and A’s finished the last couple of innings of a suspended game Friday night. For the most part, it was uneventful — Chad Pinder homered to extend Oakland’s lead and three relievers finished off the 7-3 victory — but that’s not to say anything about the day was normal. All you had to do was look at your favorite source for game information, be it box scores or advanced stats, and you’d notice that the game, which was finished on Sept. 6, didn’t appear to have happened on Sept. 6.
This was a weird one.
For the fourth-longest delayed game in history, according to Baseball-Reference’s Sean Forman, the keys to the weirdness were time and space. The last .28 of that game would be played Sept. 6, but the entirety would count as happening May 19, because it’s not possible to log the same game on two days. The end would be played in Oakland, but it would count as having been played completely in Detroit, because it’s not possible to put the players in two places at one time. Or “time.”
Read the full article here (subscription required): https://theathletic.com/1194492/2019/09/10/sarris-the-game-that-nearly-broke-the-space-time-continuum-and-your-favorite-data-website/
Originally published: September 10, 2019. Last Updated: September 10, 2019.